NPR's Planet Money reporter Chana Joffe-Walt reported on the Lego sticker shock: "I went to Toys 'R' Us recently to buy my son a Lego set for Hanukkah. Did you know a small box of Legos costs $60? Sixty bucks for 102 plastic blocks! In fact, I learned, Lego sets can sell for thousands of dollars. And despite these prices, Lego has about 70 percent of the construction-toy market. Why? Why doesn't some competitor sell plastic blocks for less? Lego's patents expired a while ago. How hard could it be to make a cheap knockoff?"

Eamon Murphy with DailyFinance explains that Lego is not without competition: "The product is so ubiquitous — like Kleenex, only non-generic — it's easy to overlook that the Lego Group does not in fact enjoy a total monopoly: Its main competitor, Montreal-based Mega Brands — another family-run business, which styles itself after Lego and sells a line of knockoff toys called Mega Bloks — claims to be No. 1 in the preschool construction toy segment. (The Lego Group, whose patents on its brick have expired, suffered repeated defeats when suing to stop the manufacture of Mega Bloks.)

"Lego made almost $3.5 billion in revenue last year," Joffe-Walt with NPR reported. "Mega made a tenth of that. But Mega Bloks may yet gain on Lego. Mega now owns the rights to Thomas the Tank Engine, Hello Kitty, and the video game Halo. And, on shelves for the first time ever this week: Mega Bloks Barbies."

Lego told Murphy with DailyFinance about the expense of the toys: "Although Lego reps in the U.S. were not forthcoming, DailyFinance did speak to Charlotte Simonsen, head of corporate communications at Lego HQ in Billund, about the question of cost. Unsurprisingly, she at first said that the company 'certainly' doesn't find its products expensive, though she later admitted to having heard this complaint before. Nevertheless, she insisted, 'We feel that our products are very much value for money. What you get is of course much more than the bricks. You get very good building instructions, you get a lot of online material, you get very, very high quality.'"

Diaz at Gizmodo also raised the expensive question with Lego representatives in Billund. Their answer: "Quality and safety are the top concerns for the Lego Group. To ensure the best and safest products, Lego bricks are made with the highest quality materials, which does factor into the cost. Using premium materials ensures that the product is not only safe, but that it is durable enough to hand down from generation to generation."

And Murphy with DailyFinance points out that when you have a licensed set such as Star Wars or Indiana Jones, those entities need a cut of the profits as well, so the price goes up.

One Lego fan on Hacker news, "jacquesm," commented on the economics for the consumer: "What's more expensive, a toy that gets used once on Christmas day and then gets discarded that costs $10, or a Lego set that costs $50 and that gets passed down three generations or more? Some of the Lego my kids are playing with went through this route: my uncle, me, my brother, my son, my brother's kids. The oldest pieces I've got are from the early '60s, they have a different formulation and didn't keep their shape as good, but anything produced after roughly 1965 is as good as new today."

A USA Today story explains how lucrative Legos can be: " Let's say two investors had $10,000 to invest at the end of 2011. One investor bought 174 shares of the Vanguard S&P 500 index exchange traded fund for $57.45 apiece, while the other bought 100 boxes of the Emerald Night Lego train set for $99.99 apiece. Fast forward to today. The stock investors would have done pretty well, with a 15 percent gain, including dividends paid. But the Lego investor would be able to sell the Lego Emerald Night trains for $203 each, for a total 103 percent profit. In other words, the Lego train would have outperformed the stock market by 587 percent."